a retrowestive

the reason i don’t have a fourth favourite on letterboxd isn’t for aesthetic purposes. or because i can’t find a film that can muster up to the mulholland/melancholia/men trifecta. it’s because i have too many films that could sneak in there, another trifecta of wes anderson films in fact. fantastic mr. fox was my favourite film in childhood — i remember seeing it for the first time on cbbc when i was about nine. in the easter holidays, just after they’d done the rebrand. the rebrand was a little bit lost on me — even if the putrid green connoted ooglies or dennis the menace or some other show i didn’t care for after arthur (by which point i’d switch over to citv), the new one felt a bit Odd. the next step had beat regionals and nationals, gone worldwide, and i rapidly felt the weight of double digits approaching; you may think i’m overexaggerating, but i was a very melancholic child with a passion for maths and reading in dual measure. one cold november afternoon i realised that after you turn ten you’re very likely to remain in double digits for the rest of your life.

i couldn’t whistle until i went to secondary school, but still tried to emulate george clooney’s trademark whistle-click-click. this would show i was a) cultured and b) number-one-cool-embodier. i loved roald dahl’s works, we had a boxset of them at home and i had read over them many a time. when i had a blistering toothache but didn’t want to wake my mum up to help me, i sat in the bathroom with james and the giant peach until half three, when my dad knocked and asked me what i was doing. armed with a shitty torch i bought from a sports direct that would often go on the fritz and ate batteries as if it were an acid-loving dog with rabies, i often spent hours after bedtime (which was a painful eight pm until year seven) reading and re-reading the memoir of his early years, which was simply called Boy. i could write a really long and rather trite sentence about how my obsessive re-reading of it was in search of trying to be a boy, a search that found nothing, for better and for worse. but i’ve instead written a sentence about writing a sentence, with my winking tone showing that i have better judgement than that, or perhaps am saving my gender(ed) troubles for something else (that will never come…)

even thinking about it, the light blue cover with illustration, dog-eared into all oblivion (i did not know what a bookmark was until i was thirteen years old!) the stories of liquorice being made out of rats (i tried it once and i think the assessment is fair), the adenoids he painfully got cut out by a wretched doctor (which permanently dissuaded me from getting my tonsils out, even though i’ve had tonsilitis seven times in my life), and the abuse he received at the hands of his schoolmasters/pupils (the description of his getting fitted with penguin coat and starched collar, along with a documentary about someone who went to eton wiling me to public schoolboy life until this dream snapped shut at the end of year six), i find myself deeply moved by that book. fantastic mr. fox, by contrast, didn’t really appeal to me. it was standard fare, akin to the bfg (whose film i remember seeing in cinema, and being deeply unenthused by) or the twits (which at least had the unmistakably dahlian image of mr twit with bits of breakfast in his beard, and which image i attempted to draw in year four during reading time, to reprimands). enjoyable but without the real get-up-and-go of something like charlie and the chocolate factory (whose tim burton adaptation intrigued me as a child, even if i wasn’t necessarily a big fan) or the aforementioned james and the giant peach. seeing the stop-motion adaptation, though, bestowed the story with a real life. the cider whose cans i would see pile up in my next-door-neighbours recycling bin (often the only thing he had in there. his death five or so years ago was not a surprise as a result, but i remember nobody noticing he’d passed away until his fiat panda was finally motored away. serves him right for never throwing our footballs over, any crossbar challenge or attempts at bicycle kicks happening next to the hedges instead of a fence) looked delectable on screen, the rat’s steadfast devotion to its protection making complete sense to a young me.

when i asked my mum if we could try cider, she looked at me rather puzzled and started talking about whether i’d read my quran for that week (i hadn’t, it was the holidays!) and how it’s important to try and understand and not just read it, these are the words allah told to the prophet muhammad (pbuh) and you’d be better served reading that than anything else (even if she was actually very supportive of my reading anything else, and still is. in a recent massive-chewing-out-of-everyone my only issue was that i don’t read enough quran and watch too many films, which i think is the best flaw to have). i could go into how beautiful the film still looks, the setpieces things of beauty and the twangy guitars (with a welcome cameo from jarvis cocker, whose ‘this is hardcore’ i currently have in the cd player) and the beautiful orange glow permeating everything that takes place in the animals’ natural habitats, but i would be preaching to the choir.

a couple months ago, i tried to put the film on for my younger cousins, giving them a Serious Filmic Education. they watched it for the first twenty minutes and then said that they were bored! shocking stuff, really. i spent ten minutes trying to convince them that it was the peak of children’s films, still goes hard even for an old person like me (i still remember thinking eighteen was basically halfway to middle age when i was seven). they weren’t hearing it, and said that i should watch some random netflix tv schlock with them. i thought after this, maybe they’re just not in the mood for it. seeing them a few months later, i put on kiki’s delivery service and they did the same routine. kids these days, wouldn’t know good taste if it hit them over the head…

the next film of anderson’s i remember watching was moonrise kingdom. it was on at some point, on some channel or maybe on a streaming service in the hazy period of year eight-early year nine. i remember not liking it much, and rewatching it a little while ago i can safely say i still hold that opinion, if warming to it a bit. i also watched the french dispatch at some point in april twenty-twenty-two, but i don’t remember anything about this watch, so i’ll come back to this film soon.

and a long interlude until the next one, my fledgling cinephilia being nurtured by a binge of many films directed by him in the year twelve february half-term. the first film in this binge was the grand budapest hotel. the grand budapest hotel is a fantastic film, a pitch-perfect execution of everything wes wanted to accomplish — and the idea is absolutely fantastic. there are a myriad of shots i could go on and on about. and i could. if you had me at gunpoint, or i were being examined on wes anderson for my degree. and i would be able to do it with complete and total sincerity. i don’t think i’d want to, however. there’s something much too perfect about the endeavour. i wouldn’t call the film sterile (this adjective will be appended to other films in his repertoire), but there’s something clinical about it. i think you could have it on repeat forever and be happy. i wouldn’t say that’s a particularly good thing.

i then decided to watch the royal tenenbaums the next day, armed with a copious amount of very-expensive-but-thankfully-clubcard-reduced apple and elderflower juice. this film makes up the second part of the trifecta. for all intents and purposes it’s probably worse than the grand budapest hotel. but this doesn’t matter — you have ben stiller, luke wilson, gwyneth paltrow, anjelica huston, and the late great gene hackman all playing off each other, fizzing with the type of relationship so absurd it couldn’t exist in real life, but something so real that it speaks much more to my relationship with my family (and i suspect most people’s) more than the vast majority of coming of age dreck. the soundtrack is absolutely incredible, the smaller roles are great (i always thought the kids were surprisingly good actors), and there’s a couple of scenes in it that leave me in tears by the end credits. not the one you’re probably thinking of, but i always found the bit where luke wilson breaks down on the tennis court surprisingly affecting. one of the very few times the ‘she’s adopted, it’s fine’ excuse has worked on me. the story of mordecai knocked me out on my (very recent and in memoriam) third watch. i’ve made it a small tradition to watch the film early in every ramadan, the early cotton mouth and third-day-in-the-desert morning breath a welcome accompaniment to stephanie says. i don’t think i’ve ever met anybody who doesn’t like this film, and if they do exist i would pray every night that they be damned to the hellfires. the tagline for the film is that ‘family isn’t a word. it’s a sentence’. i’m not going to bore you with gcse style analysis of wow what does sentence mean but it is a motto i keep in mind.

a reprise of the stop-motion style in isle of dogs was the next thing to grace my eyes — i enjoyed this film well enough, but there were some elements of it that irked me. did they border on orientalist? a little bit. but i’m a cat person anyway, so much of this film didn’t appeal to me on that front. bryan cranston is very good as dog no. three but i didn’t notice a sausage dog and as such, nothing really piqued my interest. i remember that there was a scientist called yoko ono which made me contort my face in such distaste that i’ve never been able to replicate since. which is a shame, because i hear far more distasteful things on a semi-regular basis and i think cartoony facial expressions would help convey the sheer amount of contempt i hold for many people who surround me.

the second film of anderson’s i didn’t enjoy was the life aquatic. i understand why directors would enjoy bill murray as a lead — he’s charismatic but not too charismatic, unkempt but not untamed, not too attractive but not too plain. he knows how to act as well, you feel something genuine in his biggest roles. for a prospective filmmaker, this is the ticket — someone who can really take the words off the page and put them back into a camera’s memory/film with nothing changed in the process. for this to work, though, you need an extremely tight screenplay that balances a billion elements in the perfect way. his role in tenenbaums is by far the weakest part of the film, but because the film is written so well, the film mostly gets away with it. the life aquatic, on the other hand, does not have that in the slightest — it’s co-written by noah baumbach, and you can absolutely tell. where dahl’s flaws and baumbach’s ones synthesise into something beautiful and unique in fantastic mr. fox, in the life aquatic murray’s, baumbach’s, and anderson’s flaws all coalesce into a film that i know could be better, but i’m not sure how it could be. willem defoe in short shorts and a motley crew wreaking havoc under the seven seas, even with the aforementioned gripes i have, is still a pretty good time.

baumbach’s next screenplay, the squid and the whale is one which acts as the complete opposite to the royal tenenbaums. autobiographical to the max, where tenenbaums invents a novel to adapt from. the film (also directed by baumbach), isn’t a rip-off or pale imitation of anderson. far from it! but its depiction of family, while accurate to baumbach’s life (and again, probably a lot of other people’s) is not one that speaks to me. being a film snob growing up, cribbing from pink floyd, wanking over a picture and spreading semen over bookshelves, and getting absolutely pissed at the tender age of twelve are not things which i can relate to (which isn’t a good or a bad thing, necessarily), but the images are nowhere near as arresting as the depictions of family in tenenbaums. there’s emotion there, a truth and earnestness which i appreciate, but little else aside from this. i would still say i liked the film — it has the honour of being a three-star-and-liked film on my letterboxd, which is probably the most interesting rating to have — but my issues with it only really become articulable when taken in contrast with tenenbaums. even the owen wilson subplot in that (which is good but not particularly emotion-evincing) gets more out of me than the weepy, almost autofellatious tone of the squid and the whale. what also unites the two films is a surprisingly good performance from the main child actors — a youthful jesse eisenberg and even-more-youthful owen kline are really what hold the film together for me, with jeff daniels and laura linney falling flat as Divorced Parents.

the last film i watched of anderson’s in this binge was the darjeeling limited. as if he heard these paragraphs, my murray issue on proud displa, the film opens with murray trying to make a train, the camera hanging on him as the titular darjeeling limited speeds away. adrien brody sprints into frame, jason schwartzman and owen wilson in tow, their copious amount of custom suitcases managing to be thrown on as murray is left in their dust. this opening conveys one of my favourite (and i think, least talked about) gifts of anderson — he is an incredibly self-agonistic filmmaker. it’s an easier (and not necessarily wrong) reading to take this as being quote unquote meta, but i think the physical besting of murray by the new trio displays a level of self-critque (not just self-awareness) that permeates the entire film. the first time i watched this film, i would say i solidly enjoyed it and little more than that. the is that symbolic line got a big laugh out of me (and still does), the setting of india pleasant, if the presentation occasionally falls into disconcertingly exoticist tendencies, and the cinematography really beautiful. i’m sure i had other thoughts about it at the time, but the second i rewatched the film, any previous experience of it seemed to recede into the aether.

last summer, amongst the acrid smell of pvc that lingered round my living room, i had a day where i watched three (technically four, depending on if short films count) films. close in the morning (fantastic), requiem for a dream in the afternoon (pretty good), and to cap off the evening, the darjeeling limited. watching it the second time, my eyes were opened. i don’t know why i watched it, what invisible hand guided me to click the restart from beginning that always crops up on disney plus, but the second time was a revelation. i have a very complex and close relationship with my brothers, and the only film i’ve watched that’s ever captured any of the nuances there has been the darjeeling limited. not even necessarily because i relate to francis, peter, or jack in particular, or because my mum is like anjelica huston. the way they interact with each other, despite being a world away from how i would interact with my brothers (passing around vaguely illegal painkillers is a big no-no!) speaks to me. the random fights, knowing what each other wants for breakfast, but niceness when it matters. and this may be delving much-too-much into saccharine parables about family (à la fast and furious), but when watching it the second time, i ended up crying not directly after the film finished, but the day after. very softly, a tear dropping onto my butter-and-jam bagel (don’t knock it until you try it), but for certain precipitated by the film. i won’t spoil it, but unlike tenenbaums it is That Scene which really bowls me over, every single time. my third time watching it (again in february, but of this year amidst a real Mental Health Incident) it was this scene which led me to tears (i should clarify. i don’t cry at films particularly often. it’s mainly wes anderson films which cause it). seeing the new train at the end chugging away to champs-elysees is one of the most beautiful things ever put to film, even if i cant really say why it affects me so much. what the darjeeling limited represents is the three sides of wes coming into conflict — the boy(s)-done-wrong (think rushmore), the more human stuff (tenenbaums, asteroid city) and the more whimsical elements (grand budapest hotel, french dispatch) synthesising three permutations of thesis/antithesis simultaneously into one beautiful ninety-minute adventure round india, managing to lampoon finding-yourself woo-woo subcontinental nonsense and portray a narrative of perhaps not finding-yourself, but of finding your family. if family is a sentence, the darjeeling limited is the trial which leads to it, the reprisal of the film’s opening sequence towards the end up there with some of the great cathartic runs in film (second only to the worst person in the world).

the half term unfortunately ended, and the binge had left me wesed out. as such, i didn’t watch another one of his films until asteroid city in cinemas, nearly two years ago. this was the summer of work, an hour commute and two buses to work in a care home, ostensibly to help out with admin but in reality doing preliminary checks for job interviews. i would often be pestered in doing this by a fairly cheerful resident called kit, who couldn’t speak but would spend the entire day signing for a cigarette, to which my receptionist-in-arms (the vast majority of the time, a lovely woman called dee with the knockout combination of the thickest bristolian accent i’ve heard from somebody without grey hair, and a slight rasp that would make anything she said put a smile on your face) would have to admonish him every few minutes to do something else. the day i went to see asteroid city, i was told there was a button to autoreject anybody who required visa sponsorship on the internal hiring website. as the amount of people i had to call about what was three vacancies was getting extremely unwieldy, i was told that the care home company quote unquote couldn’t sponsor anybody at this moment in time, so i had the surprisingly grotesque responsibility of flushing four hundred people’s chances at a new life down the toilet. many of these people slipped through the net though, so in the preliminary interviews i learned that the first question you ask should be if they need sponsorship, to which 30% of people answered yes, to which i then had to (out of niceness, not company policy) ask another question to keep up the pretence that this wouldn’t be what disqualified them. the other questions were quite boring, so i won’t recount them here. on the day i booked to watch asteroid city (i was told that i could take a half day on this day anyway, so i thought why not kill two birds with one stone), i walked in and was asked if i would mind giving a woman an interview. she was stood right in front of me, so i didn’t feel like i could say no. i had the actual interview questions in the depths of my work email (which for some reason could only store about a hundred emails at a time, and was constantly telling me to DELETE SOME EMAILS to free up space. one time i didn’t get this warning and as such, couldn’t receive emails for a week or so. stupid system!), so i obliged. i was seventeen years old interviewing this woman with about thirteen years of experience as a care worker, told to score her qualities and answers out of five. i gave her a four in most things.

the bus into town took the better part of an hour, the wait interminable, and the book i was reading (if memory serves, sartre’s nausea) cruelly left on my nightstand. i had signed up to an event very kindly put on by the watershed (about cinema programming) that started as soon as asteroid city finished, so no time to reflect on what i would see. i had an unfortunately explosive bottle of apple and raspberry sparkling water with me, but there was only one other person in the cinema, who sat right at the front (i was at the back), so the embarrassment from when the bottle spurted all over my shoes was luckily not amplified. this dominated my mind for about the first ten minutes of the film, but what came after fortunately took over each and every part of my body, even my physical head which had developed a rather nasty headache. the stop-motion alien, jason schwartzman burning his fingers staring at scarlett johansson, the ridiculous song the children sing. the black-and-white message to just keep telling the story that, despite how twee this sounds, stays with me even today. drenched in equal parts ersatz mid-50s aesthetics and eternal sunshine, asteroid city is one of the most beautiful films i have ever seen. it convinced me that wes anderson really had something new, and invigorating, to say, even more than twenty-five years into his career. it wasn’t my favourite film of twenty-twenty three (oppenheimer and killers of the flower moon would still place above it, even if i would probably like oppenheimer much less on a rewatch. there’s some quote about how reading a book is an event in space-time, and even if i cant find it in my wayward michaelmas notes i think the sentiment still stands), but it was absolutely in my top three for that year. and probably still in the top ten of the decade so far.

his preceding film, the french dispatch (see, i told you i’d come back to it soon. ish) would also be in that list if the third story it tells was of any similar quality to the first two — or technically three, owen wilson riding round a town called ennui is like so wes anderson it hurts, but it works. even if léa seydoux going half naked is a bit of a jumpscare, the first story (about benicio del toro, a painter in jail) is oddly touching, less because of what it says about art (if memory serves, not much) and more for how it presents everything (which if memory serves, was really rather sweet without toppling over into saccharine). the second story is somehow even more wes anderson, and it does hurt to watch. mainly because timothee chalamet as oddly seductive effete french protester no. two isn’t much of a stretch for him, so he’s able to work his (i think, quite underrated) comedic chops against the perfect foil of frances mcdormand. even if the may 68 protest is (i have to say, somewhat unsurprisingly) bleached of all its fervour, the way the french dispatch plays out makes it clear that we are through the simulacraic looking glass — when we pan to physical representations of these stories, they’re not the truth in the traditional sense, but representations of representations of representations, so i let the story get away with it because of that. the last story, however, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. not because of any political reasons, but for me, it felt exceedingly lazy. i like jeffrey wright a lot (and am glad he’s a wesular/wegular/wesgular) but his performance falls flat, the whole detective conceit has been done (by wes!) and the ending conversation felt oddly shoehorned in. i still like the film a lot, its dedication to deceased writers not touching me but making me smile nonetheless, like when a child tells you a joke you’ve heard a million times before but your laugh isn’t completely put on. the ending cover of aline by jarvis cocker (my favourite wesular) is also a great time.

in another february half term, i did not do another binge, but did watch rushmore, which felt like the missing piece of the puzzle for my wes-watching. it was an odd half-term. there was clearly something amiss in my life, but i ascribed it to the fact that i had muttered to myself on a crowded bus home a few weeks ago that the half-term would be my last chance to relax for four months, a-levels standing tall on the horizon. i had already given up my christmas holiday for january mocks (which weren’t particularly good, in spite of the oddly large amount of revision i did for them), so i went full-throttle into film-watching in that cold half-term. the vast majority of films i saw were solid sevens, with rushmore the most solid of these sevens. babyfaced jason schwartzman is great in it, turning the idiot savant into something actually believable and delightfully irritating. i am (shock horror) much less enthused about bill murray in the film, and the slightly odd hot-for-teacher plot doesn’t really do it for me. it does feel like the best example of the side of wes i like the least, but which i still appreciate. occasionally you see people describe the platonic wes anderson film — this does not exist. even the darjeeling limited, which is the synthesis of his three sides is nowhere near this idea, new things arising from this synthesis. however, i think there’s a case to be made of rushmore being the platonic realisation of one of these facets — boy-done-wrong-done-slightly-better appeals to many, and i think it works well enough in rushmore. the most solid of sevens, ok idea with a great execution.

bottle rocket, despite not being as good an execution of this boy-done-wrong style i still like more. the shabbiness of it all, the plot which leaves you scrunching up your face not out of confusion, but more bemusement, the triple wilsons, and a surprisingly touching romance all combine to make the brief ninety-minute runtime a highly pleasant one. scorsese put it in his top ten films of his nineties — i wouldn’t go that far, but his observation that the film conveys the simple joys and interactions between people so well is completely true, and is anderson’s best trait. even in his first feature-lngth, this quality shines through, every word bursting at the seams with humanity even if the rest of the film doesn’t match up the best.

the collection of short(ish) films anderson released on netflix last year, more adaptations of dahl stories doesn’t burst at the seams in the slightest. the films are so hermetic that any awareness of the seams keeping them together seems to live on a different planet. i remember reading the collection half of the adaptation’s stories come from (the wonderful story of henry sugar and six more), and not thinking much of it. i also remember reading poison when i was younger (unfortunately no remembrance of when exactly) and loving it. i was somewhat excited to watch these stories adapted by anderson released directly into the comfort of my own home. this was around the time of the tiktok trend to film something with lots of pastel colours and slightly symmetrical and call it wes anderson. one of the many entries into the romanticise-your-life coterie of tiktoks, all of which grated on me to no end. the midpoint between daydreaming the days away and actually living, an understanding of reality but not any sort of grappling with it. half arsed escapism for people who think listening to channel orange makes them interesting. when watching the longest (and unfortunately best) short film, the wonderful story of henry sugar, it felt as if the tiktok trend really had won out. like if you asked an ai from five years in the future to generate a wes anderson film and pulled the plug halfway through generation. everything looks bleached to oblivion, i don’t care for cumberbatch as a wesular, and the screenplay is dead on arrival. the same can be said for the rest of the films, so i wont waste my breath. what i will say, however, is that the adaptation of poison particularly enervated me. i will still defend the story (not the racial slurs though!), but the adaptation of it doesn’t do anything for me. the entire anthology is glossed by the netflix sheen, mediating (much like romanticise-your-lifers) between reality and fantasy while missing the different appeals of both, the idiosyncrasies completely lost. even with all of this, anderson’s netflix short films somehow contain more verve and vigour than ninety percent of the other netflix originals combined, which rocket up the letterboxd popular list and then disappear without a trace, two weeks of discourse over queerbaiting, and a three point two rating.

the reason for me writing this (surprisingly long) retrowestive is because on monday, i saw the phoenician scheme. i laughed a solid amount, i never felt bored, and the accompaniment of ribena and slightly stale m&s white chocolate cookies helped the film go down extremely well. yet in all of it, i felt that there was something missing. as the end credits rolled, i thought it would take me a very long time to actually articulate. thankfully, a woman whose face, name, or any other discerning feature i didn’t perceive managed to take the words out of my mouth — her exclamation of the film being (direct quote) exactly what i expected. it didn’t feel like there was any progression at all, that the entire crushing weight of anderson’s oeuvre has finally come down on him, the anvil of rule-of-thirds clattering down with a loud crash, leaving every film of his — from bottle rocket to henry sugar, and all the detours inbetween — in a single slice of wes anderson toast. all the actors do a good job, the outfits are on point, it’s twee but not too twee, the film looks gorgeous, it makes you laugh lots while telling a touching story. but it doesn’t do anything new, treading and retreading water accompanied with a nice soundtrack and a colourful cast making cute if forgettable cameos. it’s not a crime to make cinematic toast, it’s what i have for breakfast almost every day of the week with a cup of coffee and some nutella, and releasing as many films as anderson does makes it incredibly difficult to innovate, but it’s still possible. asteroid city showcased that. but when you’ve been attempting to reach the stars for your entire directorial life, releasing a good, sometimes great film which seems to be content hovering at the edges of the atmosphere isn’t good enough. i’d rather he shoot for the stars and fail, even if it leads to a hundred more life aquatics, then aim to please, succeed, but not do anything more than that.